Re: [Savannah-hackers] Time for a news item?

[Elfyn McBratney]

Hello Alexander,

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 12:12:24 -0400, Alexander (Sasha) Wait wrote:
> 
> Elfyn, Michael, Sylvain,
> 
> I would love to help Savannah; I offered to help many months ago but
> received no reply.  I'm interested primarily in supporting the GNU
> system and in particular in GNU arch, web access (to the ARCH
> repository) and signed GPG  (ARCH) changesets and the over-all plan to
> transition to GForge.

If you have the time we could use an extra pair of hands as there is
an awful lot of work that need's to be done, but support for GNU Arch
isn't our highest priority, not in a long shot.  A short summary of
what we need to get working on would be something like this:

  - CVSROOT directory management (modules, cvswrappers, {log,commit}info, etc)
  - Download area management (uploading, renaming, linking, deleting, etc)
  - Mailing list management (creating, changing password, deleting, etc)

These three are bare minimum; without them a Savannah project is just
a CVS repository and a broken front-end.  Without the above we won't
be accepting new projects.

> I understand there are higher priorities from
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-06/msg00101.html
>
> Since there are plenty of other services (most obviously
> http://gna.org) that offer what Savannah used to offer it might be
> nice if the GNU project's own revision control system was a larger
> focus here.

It would be nice, but it's not going to happen any time soon.  Before
adding new features (that are not critical to new and existing
projects) to Savannah we need to fix the existing features and replace
functionality that was removed after the crack.

> I know there are other people interested in ARCH support:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-06/msg00016.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2003-11/msg00615.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2003-08/msg00072.html
> 
> Clearly the break-in last year slowed all this down but from August to
> December 2003 ARCH was not the first priority at Savannah either.
> Perhaps now with the departure of Mathieu Roy (aka GNA)  there are
> other people (me for one) that want to place it higher on the list?

Thanks for the links but I've seen them before, and like I said above,
GNU Arch is waaaay down at the bottom of the TODO list.  Do you think
it would be realistic to add GNU Arch support to Savannah while at
present it's lack of features (and added annoyance) is causing people
to move their project elsewhere, slowing down their projects'
development, and generally giving Savannah a bad reputation?

I don't.

As for Mathieu leaving Savannah and starting up Gna! (with others),
that is totally irrelevant to the pro's and con's of supporting GNU
Arch at Savannah.  IIRC, Mathieu spent quite a lot of time trying to
get Arch working well (and it was for a while) but sftp access was
proving troublesome.

> Sasha
> http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/~await
> 
> PS. I know there has been some acrimonious discussion on this list of
> late; I'm used to it.  I've used free software commercially since
> 1993.  My supervisor likes to say "It's not such a good thing to be
> ahead of your time."    (eg. search for "linux gnu guru" at Google
> groups. )
> 

There has, and because of events in the last six months Savannah has
lost a dedicated set of hackers.  And we've just lost yet another
dedicated hacker because of this whole GForge migration debacle.

Anyway, like I said above, we could certainly use the help if you have
the time, but if all you want to do is campaign for GNU Arch support
at Savannah, then I'm afraid your out of luck, as it will be falling
on (at least my) deaf ears.

-- 
Elfyn